SYSTEMS

Sun Fire X4200, Sun Fire X4600 and NetBeans IDE 5.5 Best the Competition; to Be Named Industry Leaders for 2007 Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java technology and Solaris, highlighted three industry leading products -- Sun Fire X4200, Sun Fire X4600 and NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 5.5 -- as recipients of Technology of the Year Awards by InfoWorld. Garnering top honors from the InfoWorld Test Center, Sun is honored with prestigious titles: Best Server, Best High-Performance Server and Java IDE Innovator. InfoWorld's 2007 Technology of the Year Awards are drawn from all products tested by the InfoWorld Test Center during 2006. InfoWorld's Test Center reviewed the Sun Fire X4200 in February, giving it an 8.7 out of 10 -- an excellent rating. The review found that the Sun Fire X4200 "is a serious server in a seriously well-designed package." In December InfoWorld published its review of the Sun Fire X4600 scoring an 8.9 out of 10 -- another excellent rating. The review calls the Sun Fire X4600 "an extraordinarily well- engineered server." Under the Best Hardware category the Sun Fire X4200 and X4600 have been awarded with respective titles "Best Server" and "Best High-Performance Server" of the Year -- for 2007. "Sun packed a whole lot of power into the Sun Fire X4600, which sports as many as eight AMD Opteron dual-core CPUs and 128GB of RAM. The plentiful processing and I/O resources make this server a tremendous platform for virtualization, HPC, and database applications. And the overall server design is impeccable." -- Paul Venezia, InfoWorld, December 1, 2006. Sun also takes a prestigious title from this year's InfoWorld Technology Awards in the Application Development category. Securing the Java IDE Innovator Award -- Sun's NetBeans 5.5 is called out in InfoWorld's 2007 report as "an intuitive, well-designed IDE with superb collaboration and remarkable features." The review on Sun's NetBeans 5.5 notes, "NetBeans already had the most complete collaboration features among IDE platforms. This year it added important new modules such as Matisse, the most advanced Java software GUI designer available today, and complete support for Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5. NetBeans is likely all that developers of enterprise Java applications will need."